#and how much money the ceo was funnelling into his private accounts and ventures

[beyondthisdarkhouse]

Disclaimer: I love and use the Metric system and am in NO WAY advocating for its abolition

However,

I really fucking love old, bizarre, hard-to-calculate measurement systems. Sometimes they're fairly simple, and sometimes they evoke a world for me where people got very into one particular realm of expertise and did not worry much about the minutiae of others. Because if they did that profession's guild would send around enforcers to stop them from encroaching onto their turf.

Practical example: Eggs! I've always bought eggs in the dozen. But the dozen is itself a unit of measurement, and it blew my mind when I first learned of places that sold eggs in units of 10.

Meanwhile, horses only make sense in Horse. They're measured in hands, half-hands, and quarter-hands. One hand is 4 inches. The decimal system works in base four, so 14.2 hands means 14 hands and 2 inches. (That's 58 inches, measured from the hump just before a horse's neck begins. It's also about the size of a large pony or small horse.)

Carats. In ye oldey dayes, a troy ounce (1/12 of a troy pound) was made up of 24 ounce carats, which were divisible into 20 grains troy, or, four ounce grains (a totally different thing from grain grains) which could then make four ounce quarters of 1.5 grains each. What the fuck. Wheels within wheels.

(Yes, that's why we talk about "24 carat gold", meaning that as close as is humanly possible, all 24 carats of the ounce are pure gold. It's a great fineness for a ring that will get the absolute shit beaten out of it if you work with your hands.)

Nautical miles should bother me more but honestly they make way more sense than the other miles do because I've read Longitude. It's 1/60 of 1/360 of the circumference of the earth. The earth is a giant sundial. I can't explain it any more clearly than that.

Bushels. Bushels don't make sense anymore but we still pretend they do. "A bushel of oats weighs 34 pounds," we say. "A bushel of barley is 48." Back in MY day, a bushel was 8 dry gallons, 4 pecks, or 2 kennings, and that's the way we LIKED it.

Board feet. My brother handles lumber for a living and he's explained it to me half a dozen times but I still don't and maybe never will understand board feet.

#well he HANDLED lumber for a living #but he hacked the work computers until he could see how much everyone was being paid #and how much money the ceo was funnelling into his private accounts and ventures #and told a coworker he was being underpaid #and he claims it's probably unrelated but I find it SUSPICIOUS TIMING that he got laid off a week later #ANYWAY

[gordonwilliamsweb]

Salesforce, Google, Facebook. How Big Tech Undermines California’s Public Health System.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom has embraced Silicon Valley tech companies and health care industry titans in response to the covid-19 pandemic like no other governor in America — routinely outsourcing life-or-death public health duties to his allies in the private sector.

This story also ran on Protocol. It can be republished for free.

At least 30 tech and health care companies have received lucrative, no-bid government contracts, or helped fund and carry out critical public health activities during the state’s battle against the coronavirus, a KHN analysis has found. The vast majority are Newsom supporters and donors who have contributed more than $113 million to his political campaigns and charitable causes, or to fund his policy initiatives, since his first run for statewide office in 2010.

For instance, the San Francisco-based software company Salesforce — whose CEO, Marc Benioff, is a repeat donor and is so tight with the governor that Newsom named him the godfather of his first child — helped create My Turn, California’s centralized vaccine clearinghouse, which has been unpopular among Californians seeking shots and has so far cost the state $93 million.

Verily Life Sciences, a sister company of Google, another deep-pocketed Newsom donor, received a no-bid contract in March 2020 to expand covid testing — a $72 million venture that the state later retreated on. And after Newsom handed another no-bid testing contract — now valued at $600 million — to OptumServe, its parent company, national insurance giant UnitedHealth Group dropped $100,000 into a campaign account he can tap to fight the recall effort against him.

Newsom’s unprecedented reliance on private companies — including health and technology start-ups — has come at the expense of California’s overtaxed and underfunded public health system. Current and former public health officials say Newsom has entrusted the essential work of government to private-sector health and tech allies, hurting the ability of the state and local health departments to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and prepare for future threats.

“This outsourcing is weakening us. The lack of investment in our public health system is weakening us,” said Flojaune Cofer, a former state Department of Public Health epidemiologist and senior director of policy for Public Health Advocates, which has lobbied unsuccessfully for years for more state public health dollars.

“These are companies that are profit-driven, with shareholders. They’re not accountable to the public,” Cofer said. “We can’t rely on them helicoptering in. What if next time it’s not in the interest of the business or it’s not profitable?”

Kathleen Kelly Janus, Newsom’s senior adviser on social innovation, said the governor is “very proud of our innovative public-private partnerships,” which have provided “critical support for Californians in need during this pandemic.”

State Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly echoed the praise, saying private-sector companies have filled “important” roles during an unprecedented public health crisis.

The state’s contract with OptumServe has helped dramatically lower covid test turnaround times after a troubled start. Another subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, OptumInsight, received $41 million to help California rescue its outdated infectious disease reporting and monitoring system last year after it crashed.

“Not only are we much better equipped on all of these things than we were at the beginning, but we are also seeing some success,” Ghaly said, “whether it’s on the vaccination front, which has really picked up and put us in a place of success, or just being able to do testing at a broad scale. So, I feel like we’re in a reasonable position to continue to deal with covid.”

The federal government finances most public health activities in California and significantly boosted funding during the pandemic, but local health departments also rely on state and local money to keep their communities safe.

In his first year as governor, the year before the pandemic, Newsom denied a budget request from California’s 61 local public health departments to provide $50 million in state money per year to help rebuild core public health infrastructure — which had been decimated by decades of budget cuts — despite warnings from his own public health agency that the state wasn’t prepared for what was coming.

After the pandemic struck, Newsom and state lawmakers turned away another budget request to support the local health departments driving California’s pandemic response, this time for $150 million in additional annual infrastructure funding. Facing deficits at the time, the state couldn’t afford it, Newsom said, and federal help was on the way.

Yet covid cases continued to mount, and resources dwindled. Bare-bones staffing meant that some local health departments had to abandon fundamental public health functions, such as contact tracing, communicable disease testing and enforcement of public health orders.

“As the pandemic rages on and without additional resources, some pandemic activities previously funded with federal CARES Act resources simply cannot be sustained,” a coalition of public health officials warned in a late December letter to Newsom and legislative leaders.

Newsom has long promoted tech and private companies as a way to improve government, and has leaned on the private sector throughout his political career, dating to his time as San Francisco mayor from 2004 to 2011, when he called on corporations to contribute to his homelessness initiatives.

And since becoming governor in January 2019, he has regularly held private meetings with health and tech executives, his calendars show, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

“We’re right next door to Silicon Valley, of course, so technology is our friend,” Newsom wrote in his 2013 book, “Citizenville,” arguing that “government needs to adapt to this new technological age.”

With California’s core public health infrastructure already gutted, Newsom funneled taxpayer money to tech and health companies during the pandemic or allowed them to help design and fund certain public health activities.

Other industries have jumped into covid response, including telecommunications and entertainment, but not to the degree of the health and technology sectors.

“It’s not the ideal situation,” said Daniel Zingale, who has steered consequential health policy decisions under three California governors, including Newsom. “What is best for Google is not necessarily best for the people of California.”

Among the corporate titans that have received government contracts to conduct core public health functions is Google’s sister company Verily.

Google and its executives have given more than $10 million to Newsom’s gubernatorial campaigns and special causes since 2010, according to state records. It has infiltrated the state’s pandemic response: The company, along with Apple, helped build a smartphone alert system called CA Notify to assist state and local health officials with contact tracing, a venture Newsom hailed as an innovative, “data-driven” approach to reducing community spread. Google, Apple and Facebook are sharing tracking data with the state to help chart the spread of covid. Google — as well as Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter and other platforms — also contributed millions of dollars in free advertising to California, in Newsom’s name, for public health messaging.

Other companies that have received lucrative contracts to help carry out the state’s covid plans include health insurance company Blue Shield of California, which received a $15 million no-bid contract to oversee vaccine allocation and distribution, and the private consulting firm McKinsey & Co., which has received $48 million in government contracts to boost vaccinations and testing and work on genomic sequencing to help track and monitor covid variants. Together, they have given Newsom more than $20 million in campaign and charitable donations since 2010.

Private companies have also helped finance government programs and core public health functions during the pandemic — at times bypassing local public health departments — under the guise of making charitable or governmental contributions, known as “behested payments,” in Newsom’s name. They have helped fund vaccination clinics, hosted public service announcements on their platforms, and paid for hotel rooms to safely shelter and quarantine homeless people.

Facebook and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic organization started by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have been among the most generous, and have given $36.5 million to Newsom, either directly or to causes and policy initiatives on his behalf. Much of that money was spent on pandemic response efforts championed by Newsom, such as hotel rooms and child care for front-line health care workers; computers and internet access for kids learning at home; and social services for incarcerated people leaving prison because of covid outbreaks.

Facebook said it is also partnering with the state to deploy pop-up vaccination clinics in hard-hit areas like the Central Valley, Inland Empire and South Los Angeles.

In prepared statements, Google and Facebook said they threw themselves into the pandemic response because they wanted to help struggling workers and businesses in their home state, and to respond to the needs of vulnerable communities.

Venture capitalist Dr. Bob Kocher, a Newsom ally who was one of the governor’s earliest pandemic advisers, said private-sector involvement helped California tremendously.

“We’re doing really well. We got almost 20 million people vaccinated and our test positivity rate is at an all-time low,” Kocher said. “Our public health system was set up to handle small-scale outbreaks like E. coli or hepatitis. Things work better when you build coalitions that go beyond government.”

Public health leaders acknowledge that private-sector participation during an emergency can help the state respond quickly and on a large scale. But by outsourcing so much work to the private sector, they say, California has also undercut its already struggling public health system — and missed an opportunity to invest in it.

Take Verily. Newsom tapped the company to help expand testing to underserved populations, but the state chose to end its relationship with the company in January after county health departments rejected the partnership, in part because testing was not adequately reaching Black and Latino neighborhoods. In addition to requiring that residents have a car and Gmail account, Verily was seen by many local health officials as an outsider that didn’t understand the communities.

It takes years of shoe leather public health work to build trusted relationships within communities, said Dr. Noha Aboelata, founder and CEO of the Roots Community Health Center in the predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood of East Oakland.

“I think what’s not fine is when these corporations are claiming to be the center of equity, when in fact it can manifest as the opposite,” she said. “We’re in a neighborhood where people walk to our clinic, which is why when Verily testing first started and they were drive-up and you needed a Gmail account, most of our community wasn’t able to take advantage of it.”

To fill the gap, the clinic worked with Alameda County to offer old-fashioned walk-up appointments. “We’re very focused on disparities, and we’re definitely seeing the folks who are most at risk,” Aboelata said.

The state took a similar approach to vaccination. Instead of giving local health departments the funding and power to manage their own vaccination programs with community partners, it looked to the private sector again. Among the companies that received a vaccination contract is Color Health Inc., awarded $10 million to run 10 vaccine clinics across the state, among other covid-related work. Since partnering with California, Color has seen its valuation soar to $1.5 billion — helping it achieve “unicorn” start-up status.

As the state’s Silicon Valley partners rake in money, staffing at local health departments has suffered, in part because they don’t have enough funding to hire or replace workers. “It is our biggest commodity and it’s our No. 1 need,” said Kat DeBurgh, executive director of the Health Officers Association of California.

With inadequate staffing to address the pandemic, the state is falling further behind on other basic public health duties, such as updating data systems and technology — many county health departments still rely on fax machines to report lab results — and combating record-setting levels of sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis.

“We’ve put so many resources into law enforcement and private tech companies instead of public health,” said Kiran Savage-Sangwan, executive director of the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network. “This is having a devastating impact.”

Dr. Karen Smith, former director of the state Department of Public Health, left the state in July 2019 and now is a consultant with Google Health, one of Big Tech’s forays into the business of health care.

She believes Silicon Valley can improve the state’s crumbling public health infrastructure, especially when it comes to collecting and sharing data, but it can’t be done without substantial investment from the state. “Who the heck still uses fax? Public health doesn’t have the kind of money that tech companies have,” said Smith, who said she wasn’t speaking on behalf of Google.

Without adequate funding to rebuild its infrastructure and hire permanent workers, Smith and others fear California isn’t prepared to ride out the remainder of this pandemic — let alone manage the next public health crisis.

Statewide public health advocacy groups have formed a coalition called “California Can’t Wait” to pressure state lawmakers and Newsom to put more money into the state budget for local public health departments. They’re asking for $200 million annually. Newsom will unveil his latest state budget proposal by mid-May.

“We’re in one of those change-or-die moments,” Capitol health care veteran Zingale said. “Newsom has been at the vanguard of the nation in marshaling the help of our robust technological private sector, and we’re thankful for their contributions, but change is better than charity. I don’t want to show ingratitude, but we should keep our eyes on building a better system.”

KHN data editor Elizabeth Lucas and California politics correspondent Samantha Young contributed to this report.

Methodology: How KHN compiled data about political spending and the role of technology and health care companies in California’s covid response.

Private-sector companies from Silicon Valley and the health care industry have participated in California’s public health response to covid-19 in a variety of ways, big and small. Some have received multimillion-dollar contracts from the state of California to perform testing, vaccination and other activities. Others have donated money and resources to the effort, such as free public health advertising time.

KHN identified the companies that received pandemic-related contracts or work from the state by filing Public Records Act requests with state agencies; searching other sources, including California’s “Released COVID-19 Response Contracts” page; and contacting state agencies and companies directly.

We then searched the California Fair Political Practices Commission website for tech and health care companies that didn’t receive contracts but played a role in the state’s pandemic response by donating money and resources. Through what are known as “behested payments,” these companies donated to charitable causes or Gov. Gavin Newsom’s policy initiatives on his behalf. These contributions included money to help fund and design state public health initiatives such as quarantine hotel rooms.

Based on those searches, we found at least 30 health or technology companies that have participated in the state’s pandemic response: Google and its sister company Verily Life Sciences; Salesforce; Facebook; Apple; McKinsey & Co.; OptumServe and OptumInsight — subsidiaries of national health care company UnitedHealth Group; Netflix; Pandora; Spotify; Zoom Video Communications Inc.; electric car manufacturer BYD; Bloom Energy; Color Health Inc.; DoorDash; Twitter; Amazon; Accenture; Skedulo; Primary.Health; Pfizer; HP Inc.; Microsoft; Snapchat; Blue Shield of California; Kaiser Permanente; Lenovo Inc.; YouTube; and TikTok. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic organization started by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, also participated.

We then searched the California secretary of state’s website to determine which of those companies, and their executives, gave direct political contributions to Newsom’s personal campaign accounts and a ballot measure account run by the governor called “Newsom’s Ballot Measure Committee” during his five campaigns for statewide office since 2010, plus the ongoing recall effort against him.

We found that at least 24 of the tech or health companies that participated in the state’s pandemic response, or their executives, gave direct political contributions to Newsom, made behested payments in his name or both.

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

USE OUR CONTENT

This story can be republished for free (details).

Salesforce, Google, Facebook. How Big Tech Undermines California’s Public Health System. published first on https://nootropicspowdersupplier.tumblr.com/

[stephenmccull]

Salesforce, Google, Facebook. How Big Tech Undermines California’s Public Health System.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — California Gov. Gavin Newsom has embraced Silicon Valley tech companies and health care industry titans in response to the covid-19 pandemic like no other governor in America — routinely outsourcing life-or-death public health duties to his allies in the private sector.

This story also ran on Protocol. It can be republished for free.

At least 30 tech and health care companies have received lucrative, no-bid government contracts, or helped fund and carry out critical public health activities during the state’s battle against the coronavirus, a KHN analysis has found. The vast majority are Newsom supporters and donors who have contributed more than $113 million to his political campaigns and charitable causes, or to fund his policy initiatives, since his first run for statewide office in 2010.

For instance, the San Francisco-based software company Salesforce — whose CEO, Marc Benioff, is a repeat donor and is so tight with the governor that Newsom named him the godfather of his first child — helped create My Turn, California’s centralized vaccine clearinghouse, which has been unpopular among Californians seeking shots and has so far cost the state $93 million.

Verily Life Sciences, a sister company of Google, another deep-pocketed Newsom donor, received a no-bid contract in March 2020 to expand covid testing — a $72 million venture that the state later retreated on. And after Newsom handed another no-bid testing contract — now valued at $600 million — to OptumServe, its parent company, national insurance giant UnitedHealth Group dropped $100,000 into a campaign account he can tap to fight the recall effort against him.

Newsom’s unprecedented reliance on private companies — including health and technology start-ups — has come at the expense of California’s overtaxed and underfunded public health system. Current and former public health officials say Newsom has entrusted the essential work of government to private-sector health and tech allies, hurting the ability of the state and local health departments to respond to the coronavirus pandemic and prepare for future threats.

“This outsourcing is weakening us. The lack of investment in our public health system is weakening us,” said Flojaune Cofer, a former state Department of Public Health epidemiologist and senior director of policy for Public Health Advocates, which has lobbied unsuccessfully for years for more state public health dollars.

“These are companies that are profit-driven, with shareholders. They’re not accountable to the public,” Cofer said. “We can’t rely on them helicoptering in. What if next time it’s not in the interest of the business or it’s not profitable?”

Kathleen Kelly Janus, Newsom’s senior adviser on social innovation, said the governor is “very proud of our innovative public-private partnerships,” which have provided “critical support for Californians in need during this pandemic.”

State Health and Human Services Secretary Dr. Mark Ghaly echoed the praise, saying private-sector companies have filled “important” roles during an unprecedented public health crisis.

The state’s contract with OptumServe has helped dramatically lower covid test turnaround times after a troubled start. Another subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group, OptumInsight, received $41 million to help California rescue its outdated infectious disease reporting and monitoring system last year after it crashed.

“Not only are we much better equipped on all of these things than we were at the beginning, but we are also seeing some success,” Ghaly said, “whether it’s on the vaccination front, which has really picked up and put us in a place of success, or just being able to do testing at a broad scale. So, I feel like we’re in a reasonable position to continue to deal with covid.”

The federal government finances most public health activities in California and significantly boosted funding during the pandemic, but local health departments also rely on state and local money to keep their communities safe.

In his first year as governor, the year before the pandemic, Newsom denied a budget request from California’s 61 local public health departments to provide $50 million in state money per year to help rebuild core public health infrastructure — which had been decimated by decades of budget cuts — despite warnings from his own public health agency that the state wasn’t prepared for what was coming.

After the pandemic struck, Newsom and state lawmakers turned away another budget request to support the local health departments driving California’s pandemic response, this time for $150 million in additional annual infrastructure funding. Facing deficits at the time, the state couldn’t afford it, Newsom said, and federal help was on the way.

Yet covid cases continued to mount, and resources dwindled. Bare-bones staffing meant that some local health departments had to abandon fundamental public health functions, such as contact tracing, communicable disease testing and enforcement of public health orders.

“As the pandemic rages on and without additional resources, some pandemic activities previously funded with federal CARES Act resources simply cannot be sustained,” a coalition of public health officials warned in a late December letter to Newsom and legislative leaders.

Newsom has long promoted tech and private companies as a way to improve government, and has leaned on the private sector throughout his political career, dating to his time as San Francisco mayor from 2004 to 2011, when he called on corporations to contribute to his homelessness initiatives.

And since becoming governor in January 2019, he has regularly held private meetings with health and tech executives, his calendars show, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Apple CEO Tim Cook.

“We’re right next door to Silicon Valley, of course, so technology is our friend,” Newsom wrote in his 2013 book, “Citizenville,” arguing that “government needs to adapt to this new technological age.”

With California’s core public health infrastructure already gutted, Newsom funneled taxpayer money to tech and health companies during the pandemic or allowed them to help design and fund certain public health activities.

Other industries have jumped into covid response, including telecommunications and entertainment, but not to the degree of the health and technology sectors.

“It’s not the ideal situation,” said Daniel Zingale, who has steered consequential health policy decisions under three California governors, including Newsom. “What is best for Google is not necessarily best for the people of California.”

Among the corporate titans that have received government contracts to conduct core public health functions is Google’s sister company Verily.

Google and its executives have given more than $10 million to Newsom’s gubernatorial campaigns and special causes since 2010, according to state records. It has infiltrated the state’s pandemic response: The company, along with Apple, helped build a smartphone alert system called CA Notify to assist state and local health officials with contact tracing, a venture Newsom hailed as an innovative, “data-driven” approach to reducing community spread. Google, Apple and Facebook are sharing tracking data with the state to help chart the spread of covid. Google — as well as Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter and other platforms — also contributed millions of dollars in free advertising to California, in Newsom’s name, for public health messaging.

Other companies that have received lucrative contracts to help carry out the state’s covid plans include health insurance company Blue Shield of California, which received a $15 million no-bid contract to oversee vaccine allocation and distribution, and the private consulting firm McKinsey & Co., which has received $48 million in government contracts to boost vaccinations and testing and work on genomic sequencing to help track and monitor covid variants. Together, they have given Newsom more than $20 million in campaign and charitable donations since 2010.

Private companies have also helped finance government programs and core public health functions during the pandemic — at times bypassing local public health departments — under the guise of making charitable or governmental contributions, known as “behested payments,” in Newsom’s name. They have helped fund vaccination clinics, hosted public service announcements on their platforms, and paid for hotel rooms to safely shelter and quarantine homeless people.

Facebook and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic organization started by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have been among the most generous, and have given $36.5 million to Newsom, either directly or to causes and policy initiatives on his behalf. Much of that money was spent on pandemic response efforts championed by Newsom, such as hotel rooms and child care for front-line health care workers; computers and internet access for kids learning at home; and social services for incarcerated people leaving prison because of covid outbreaks.

Facebook said it is also partnering with the state to deploy pop-up vaccination clinics in hard-hit areas like the Central Valley, Inland Empire and South Los Angeles.

In prepared statements, Google and Facebook said they threw themselves into the pandemic response because they wanted to help struggling workers and businesses in their home state, and to respond to the needs of vulnerable communities.

Venture capitalist Dr. Bob Kocher, a Newsom ally who was one of the governor’s earliest pandemic advisers, said private-sector involvement helped California tremendously.

“We’re doing really well. We got almost 20 million people vaccinated and our test positivity rate is at an all-time low,” Kocher said. “Our public health system was set up to handle small-scale outbreaks like E. coli or hepatitis. Things work better when you build coalitions that go beyond government.”

Public health leaders acknowledge that private-sector participation during an emergency can help the state respond quickly and on a large scale. But by outsourcing so much work to the private sector, they say, California has also undercut its already struggling public health system — and missed an opportunity to invest in it.

Take Verily. Newsom tapped the company to help expand testing to underserved populations, but the state chose to end its relationship with the company in January after county health departments rejected the partnership, in part because testing was not adequately reaching Black and Latino neighborhoods. In addition to requiring that residents have a car and Gmail account, Verily was seen by many local health officials as an outsider that didn’t understand the communities.

It takes years of shoe leather public health work to build trusted relationships within communities, said Dr. Noha Aboelata, founder and CEO of the Roots Community Health Center in the predominantly Black and Latino neighborhood of East Oakland.

“I think what’s not fine is when these corporations are claiming to be the center of equity, when in fact it can manifest as the opposite,” she said. “We’re in a neighborhood where people walk to our clinic, which is why when Verily testing first started and they were drive-up and you needed a Gmail account, most of our community wasn’t able to take advantage of it.”

To fill the gap, the clinic worked with Alameda County to offer old-fashioned walk-up appointments. “We’re very focused on disparities, and we’re definitely seeing the folks who are most at risk,” Aboelata said.

The state took a similar approach to vaccination. Instead of giving local health departments the funding and power to manage their own vaccination programs with community partners, it looked to the private sector again. Among the companies that received a vaccination contract is Color Health Inc., awarded $10 million to run 10 vaccine clinics across the state, among other covid-related work. Since partnering with California, Color has seen its valuation soar to $1.5 billion — helping it achieve “unicorn” start-up status.

As the state’s Silicon Valley partners rake in money, staffing at local health departments has suffered, in part because they don’t have enough funding to hire or replace workers. “It is our biggest commodity and it’s our No. 1 need,” said Kat DeBurgh, executive director of the Health Officers Association of California.

With inadequate staffing to address the pandemic, the state is falling further behind on other basic public health duties, such as updating data systems and technology — many county health departments still rely on fax machines to report lab results — and combating record-setting levels of sexually transmitted diseases such as syphilis.

“We’ve put so many resources into law enforcement and private tech companies instead of public health,” said Kiran Savage-Sangwan, executive director of the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network. “This is having a devastating impact.”

Dr. Karen Smith, former director of the state Department of Public Health, left the state in July 2019 and now is a consultant with Google Health, one of Big Tech’s forays into the business of health care.

She believes Silicon Valley can improve the state’s crumbling public health infrastructure, especially when it comes to collecting and sharing data, but it can’t be done without substantial investment from the state. “Who the heck still uses fax? Public health doesn’t have the kind of money that tech companies have,” said Smith, who said she wasn’t speaking on behalf of Google.

Without adequate funding to rebuild its infrastructure and hire permanent workers, Smith and others fear California isn’t prepared to ride out the remainder of this pandemic — let alone manage the next public health crisis.

Statewide public health advocacy groups have formed a coalition called “California Can’t Wait” to pressure state lawmakers and Newsom to put more money into the state budget for local public health departments. They’re asking for $200 million annually. Newsom will unveil his latest state budget proposal by mid-May.

“We’re in one of those change-or-die moments,” Capitol health care veteran Zingale said. “Newsom has been at the vanguard of the nation in marshaling the help of our robust technological private sector, and we’re thankful for their contributions, but change is better than charity. I don’t want to show ingratitude, but we should keep our eyes on building a better system.”

KHN data editor Elizabeth Lucas and California politics correspondent Samantha Young contributed to this report.

Methodology: How KHN compiled data about political spending and the role of technology and health care companies in California’s covid response.

Private-sector companies from Silicon Valley and the health care industry have participated in California’s public health response to covid-19 in a variety of ways, big and small. Some have received multimillion-dollar contracts from the state of California to perform testing, vaccination and other activities. Others have donated money and resources to the effort, such as free public health advertising time.

KHN identified the companies that received pandemic-related contracts or work from the state by filing Public Records Act requests with state agencies; searching other sources, including California’s “Released COVID-19 Response Contracts” page; and contacting state agencies and companies directly.

We then searched the California Fair Political Practices Commission website for tech and health care companies that didn’t receive contracts but played a role in the state’s pandemic response by donating money and resources. Through what are known as “behested payments,” these companies donated to charitable causes or Gov. Gavin Newsom’s policy initiatives on his behalf. These contributions included money to help fund and design state public health initiatives such as quarantine hotel rooms.

Based on those searches, we found at least 30 health or technology companies that have participated in the state’s pandemic response: Google and its sister company Verily Life Sciences; Salesforce; Facebook; Apple; McKinsey & Co.; OptumServe and OptumInsight — subsidiaries of national health care company UnitedHealth Group; Netflix; Pandora; Spotify; Zoom Video Communications Inc.; electric car manufacturer BYD; Bloom Energy; Color Health Inc.; DoorDash; Twitter; Amazon; Accenture; Skedulo; Primary.Health; Pfizer; HP Inc.; Microsoft; Snapchat; Blue Shield of California; Kaiser Permanente; Lenovo Inc.; YouTube; and TikTok. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the philanthropic organization started by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, also participated.

We then searched the California secretary of state’s website to determine which of those companies, and their executives, gave direct political contributions to Newsom’s personal campaign accounts and a ballot measure account run by the governor called “Newsom’s Ballot Measure Committee” during his five campaigns for statewide office since 2010, plus the ongoing recall effort against him.

We found that at least 24 of the tech or health companies that participated in the state’s pandemic response, or their executives, gave direct political contributions to Newsom, made behested payments in his name or both.

This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.

KHN (Kaiser Health News) is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues. Together with Policy Analysis and Polling, KHN is one of the three major operating programs at KFF (Kaiser Family Foundation). KFF is an endowed nonprofit organization providing information on health issues to the nation.

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Appway raises $37M, its first-ever funding, for financial customer management tools

With the renewed push for more of the services we use everyday to be accessible online and in a non-physical way, a company out of Switzerland that builds tools for financial services companies to interact better with their customers via the web is today announcing a round of funding to expand its operations.

Appway, which provides software to help banks and others that transact with customers to build banking, mortgage, regulatory compliance and other service management tools, has raised $37 million in equity funding from a single investor, Summit Partners.

Hans Peter Wolf, Appway’s CEO who co-founded the company with Oliver Brupbacher, said in an interview that the money will go towards continued expansion of its business, both by adding more customers and by building more tools for those customers in turn to provide services to their own users. He added that North America has been one of Appway’s fastest-growing markets, and so the plan will be to double down specifically there alongside existing operations in Europe and Asia.

If you’ve not heard of Appway before in the world of tech, that’s not too unusual: the Zurich-based company has been quietly living, bootstrapped and profitable, behind the scenes and under the startup radar since 2003. But in the last 17 years, it’s managed to amass a long list of impressive customers — a list that features 10 out of 25 of the largest wealth managers in the world, including Credit Suisse, HSBC, J.P. Morgan, LGT, LPL Financial and Deutsche Bank; the telecoms giant Orange, KPMG and others.

The services that it provides range from online banking, mortgage software and wealth management, through to account management, onboarding of new services and customers, and a long list of back-office tools to manage customers and data to help the financial services companies comply with regulatory requirements.

Business has been strong, but the reason Appway finally decided to bite the bullet and raise money, Wolf said, was to ride the wave of growth, and bring in new people to the board who could help guide what the next steps might be as its business matures.

He noted that Appway has seen an acceleration of interest in recent months — predating the current health pandemic, he added, but absolutely sped up with urgency because of it — related to “business transformation.”

Yes, that’s a term thrown around a lot in the world of enterprise, but it’s actually an important one that is propelling a lot of business for disruptive startups: huge institutions have been using the same legacy systems for decades, and that creaky infrastructure finally is being replaced with more modern and flexible software, often sold as a service from the cloud, in order to expand what companies can do for their customers.

That’s where the current pandemic has figured in a key way for companies like Appway. A lot of financial services — especially those at the higher end of the market (eg wealth management) — have long existed around the concept of personal relationships and years of face-to-face service, but much of that has had to be reassessed in recent times. Some might have bristled at or resisted the changes (or investments in the changes) in the past, their hand has been forced, so to speak, in current circumstances.

But coupled with the fact that so many people today are more accustomed to carrying out much of their lives online, the changes are turning out to be, in many cases, not as painful as you might think, and in the case of financial services, we’re seeing a big turnaround and embracing of the new platforms. And that means strong business funnels for companies like Appway.

There are a number of companies providing tools to organisations to help build and run services online. Those in the same general area as Appway include Pega, Intalio, Oracle, IBM and more. One key difference is that many of these are general purpose, aiming their low-code approach to a number of verticals, which in one regard makes them potentially much bigger enterprises, but in another means they cannot speak as specifically to the needs of any particular vertical. Appway’s focus on financial services in particular — and of course the fact that financial services happens to be a hugely lucrative industry — is one thing that stood out for Summit when making the investment.

“Unlike general purpose low-code development platforms, Appway seeks to address core pain points in the financial services industry by automating the flow of work to revolutionize the customer experience and drive digital transformation across organizations,” said Dr. Matthias Allgaier, a Managing Director at Summit Partners who will also join the Appway Board of Directors, in a statement. “We believe the company has delivered impressive, consistent capital efficient growth, and we are thrilled to partner with Hans Peter Wolf, his co-founder Oliver Brupbacher and the entire Appway team.”

When you hear about companies like these, successful startups that have been off the grid of tech media because they haven’t been tightly linked to the investment cycle or any obvious consumer news stream, suddenly raising money, you have to wonder how many more there are innovating and doing more good work in the same way.

One reason Wolf said that Appway never raised money before was because when it was founded, it was just how things were.

“In 2003, venture capital and private equity didn’t exist at all in Switzerland, and I don’t think the country’s startups were on any radar of any PE house,” he said with a laugh. “Ironically, the financial crisis was when we had our first successes in the US,” partly because of its regulatory compliance tools, which were suddenly in demand. “Now, I would say it’s a steady pattern, Appway made the decision to raise growth equity during an arguably even bigger crisis.”

Indeed, as we continue to see more activity spread out beyond the most-obvious tech hubs, it may well be that yet more Appways fall under the spotlight.

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‘Canadian style’ innovation strategy has to stop being nice and start picking winners

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‘Canadian style’ innovation strategy has to stop being nice and start picking winners

Canada has a rich history of innovation, but in the next few decades, powerful technological forces will transform the global economy. Large multinational companies have jumped out to a headstart in the race to succeed, and Canada runs the risk of falling behind. At stake is nothing less than our prosperity and economic well-being. The FP set out explore what is needed for businesses to flourish and grow. Over the next three months, we’ll talk to some of the innovators, visionaries and scientists on the cutting edge of the new cutthroat economy about a blueprint for Canadian success. You can find all of our coverage here.

OTTAWA — Oilmen often fancy themselves as self-reliant innovators, never in need of government handouts. But it was a Crown corporation, the Alberta Oil Sands Technology and Research Authority, that rode to its rescue in the 1970s with funding for steam-assisted gravity drainage technology, which eventually unlocked a new wave of growth in the oilpatch.

SAGD revived the sputtering industry, and is now expected to drive growth in the oilsands.

“Without it there wouldn’t have been an oilsands industry in Alberta,” said Dan Breznitz, professor and Munk Chair of Innovation Studies.

AOSTRA was seen as a template for how government-funded innovation ought to work: a temporary program crafted to meet private sector needs, and singularly focused on achieving one goal. But fast forward nearly 50 years, and it seems Canadian policymakers have taken few lessons from the program.

Despite spending piles of money on research and development in recent years, Canada’s innovation space remains a messy tangle of government grant programs, tax credits and the newly-minted “supercluster” initiative, often with sprawling and ill-defined goals. Business investment in R&D, meanwhile, has stagnated. Many Canadian business leaders are calling for a reset.

Business sector spending on research and development has been in steady decline since 2001, falling from 1.2 per cent of GDP down to 0.9 per cent in 2015, well below a 16-country average of 1.7 per cent, according to the Conference Board of Canada. That decline has come despite a steady rise in R&D spending in the public sector, particularly by higher education institutions, which has outpaced spending in other developed nations.

  Anthony Lacavera, founder of Globalive Holdings, a Toronto-based investment firm, and of WIND Mobile, has written a book about the pitfalls of Canada’s innovation policy.

Tyler Anderson/National Post

“We spread around incentives like peanut butter — evenly — and that has a very negative set out of outcomes associated with it,” said Anthony Lacavera, founder of Globalive Holdings, a Toronto-based investment firm, and of WIND Mobile. WIND began as a startup telecommunications firm that Lacavera later sold for $1.6 billion to Shaw Communications.

In his book ‘How We Can Win: And What Happens to Us and Our Country If We Don’t’, a study of Canadian innovation policy, Lacavera points to the various pitfalls that have hindered innovative Canadian companies from growing into multinational “anchor” firms.

“Business is about winners, and we need in Canada to start recognizing that we need to pick winners, and we need to help our companies become global success stories,” he said.

Lacavera is advocating a return to an older form of innovation policy that focuses more on companies or specific areas rather than laboratories, and making bigger bets on fewer innovative firms. In short, that would mean taking a far less egalitarian, or perhaps “Canadian,” approach to innovation.

“Structurally, we are trying to excel in too many digital and knowledge economy areas,” Lacavera said. “It’s the Canadian style — spread it around, give everyone a shot. And then no one wins.”

Experts have long called for an overhaul that could simplify Canadian innovation policy, starting with a streamlining of the various programs aimed at supporting promising companies. Ottawa went at least part way toward that goal in its 2018 budget, after promising to whittle down the total number of federal grant programs from 92 to around 35.

Lacavera points to the Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax credit as an area ripe for improvement. The tax credit dishes out more than $3 billion every year to reimburse research and development spending for thousands of companies, either at 15 per cent or 35 per cent.

But the program has been criticized for being geared too specifically towards smaller companies, effectively incentivizing laggard companies to remain small, even as they enjoy subsidies year after year. The issue has become so prevalent that the program has long been called the “Walking SRED” in some business circles, a nod to the zombie TV series Walking Dead.

“You have companies that really should have already failed, or should have already been consolidated, or are really never going to get to scale, just sort of walking around,” Lacavera said.

Innovation programs can also add an administrative burden for entrepreneurs.

Wealthsimple CEO Michael Katchen says the government has been supportive, but the paperwork is daunting.

Peter J. Thompson/National Post

Michael Katchen, the co-founder and CEO of Wealthsimple Financial Inc., raised around $1 million through government programs in the early days of his company, from both the Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), a long-standing federal program aimed at small and medium-sized companies, and The Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, which offers early-stage loans to firms.

Katchen said the process was administratively intensive, forcing the small firm to hire a consultant just to assist with the mounds of paperwork. What’s more, the application process for FedDev effectively repeated the due diligence already carried out by Impression Ventures, a Toronto-based venture capital firm that invested $1.9 million in Wealthsimple in September 2014.

“The most bizarre part of it was I had just raised $1.9 million from really sophisticated investors, and I had to start from scratch on an even more arduous process, this time from a much less sophisticated government agency,” Katchen said.

Still business owners are also quick to defend Ottawa’s innovation efforts under Navdeep Bains, the minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development.

“In general the current government has been very supportive,” Katchen said, but added that in meetings with Bains he has suggested Canada needs to be more ambitious in attracting talent and innovative companies. “We can’t match dollar for dollar investments that other bigger countries are making, so we need to pick our spots and really double down.”

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made innovation a central part of his mandate in 2016, underpinned by a new initiative to create several innovation superclusters that he hopes will create the the next technological breakthrough.

Those policy efforts were then bulked up again in the 2017 budget when Ottawa raised spending on university research and development.

Navdeep Bains, the minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development.

Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

Even so, critics argue the $950-million superclusters program is ultimately a drop in the bucket when considering it is spread across five different groups, encapsulating everything from protein-rich potatoes to marine sensors that track animal activity.

“It’s what you would call an accounting error if you look at the overall budget,” Munk’s Breznitz said.

Breznitz suggests Canada should instead unleash its capital from various government programs and funnel it directly into a few select sectors where Canada has demonstrated potential: artificial intelligence, stem cell research, autonomous car manufacturing or financial services, to name a few. Most importantly, he says, the funding should go directly toward technologies that can be sold on the market, rather than focusing on tests in the laboratory.

“Where the federal government should be focusing is on what needs to be done to move more Canadian companies towards R&D — full stop,” Breznitz said. “Instead, any time there’s a hot new trend, something new and shiny, we spend a lot of money on it. And we spend almost no time looking at how to turn this into an industry.”

Such solutions come with their own set of challenges, however. By loosening  government controls over how capital is spent, and by funnelling capital more directly into companies and technologies, Ottawa runs the risk of throwing billions of dollars at abject failures.

Indeed, Jack Mintz, fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy, is wary of government-directed innovation that can be subject to the vagaries of politics.

“Governments are not great at picking winners, but losers are great at picking governments,” he said.

Take, for example, Ottawa’s recent decision to use its Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF) to pay out $250 million in reimbursements for steel and aluminum producers hurt by U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade tariffs.

But observers argue that direct programs are nonetheless preferable to the more passive, and widespread, tax credit system. A 2011 report by Tom Jenkins, now the chair of the National Research Council of Canada, recommended Ottawa scrap much of its tax credits for corporations in favour of higher direct spending on innovation.

It’s an approach that even skeptics are warming up to.

“I’ve been leaning more towards grants these days,” said Mintz. “The one criticism of a grant rather than a tax credit is it can be used politically. But I think if it’s administered well, it can certainly be subjected to far less political intervention.”

The way forward for Canada then, is perhaps to embrace a policy that is much bolder than its current form. The right government program helped usher in the second wave of oilsands development in northern Alberta. Similar breakthroughs are crucial, especially if Canada wants to be front and centre of the next industrial shift.

“In Canada we do two things that employ every single person: we pull resources out of the ground and we finance that activity,” Wealthsimple’s Katchen said. “That’s our economy in a nutshell. Twenty years from now that will not be true��or if it’s true, we’re in trouble.”

***

A SHORT LIST OF INNOVATION-INDUCING PROGRAMS Canada has a long list of government grant programs and tax credits available to innovative—or even not-so-innovative—businesses. That list could soon get a lot shorter after Ottawa announced in its 2018 budget it would streamline the number of existing federal grant programs from 92 down to around 35. Here is a brief rundown of some of the most prominent programs.

Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED): A tax credit program that effectively reimburses Canadian businesses for investments in research and development. It is administered by the Canada Revenue Agency. Companies can claim input tax credits (ITCs) at either 15 per cent or 35 per cent, depending on the company and size of investment.

Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP): A program aimed at scaling up innovations in small and medium sized companies. IRAP is one of the oldest programs in Canada, founded shortly after the Second World War. Contributions come in the form of anything from consultations to financing for innovation. It is administered by the Canadian Research Council of Canada, and is widely considered one of the most effective programs of its kind.

Canada Small Business Financing Program (CSBFP): A program that offers loans to businesses with gross revenues of $10 million or less. Loans can be a maximum of $1 million.

Southern Ontario Fund for Investment in Innovation (SOFII): A federal initiative that offers loans to companies in southwestern Ontario. Loans range from $150,000 to $500,000, and are geared toward helping small and medium-sized companies scale up technologies. It is supported through the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario (FedDev Ontario).

Strategic Innovation Fund (SIF): A fund focused on “encouraging R&D”, attracting investments, facilitating growth and advancing industrial research. The fund will spend $1.26 billion over five years (ending in 2023) in both repayable and non-repayable contributions to companies and post-secondary institutions.

Sustainable Development Technology Canada (SDTC): An agency focused on developing clean technologies. SDTC oversees two separate funds. One is the SD Tech Fund, totalling $550 million, which provides money to pre-commercial clean technology projects aimed at greening air, water and soil. The other is the NextGen Biofuels Fund, totalling $500 million, which is aimed at developing renewable fuels through private equity financings. The fund is currently being wound down.

• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: jesse_snyder

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2 Berkeley grads are using AI to make stock-buying decisions — and it could change investing forever

EquBot / Art Amador

Equbot's AI Powered Equity ETF uses IBM's Watson technology to construct a stock portfolio, employing machine learning to make rational investment decisions.

The original idea for the fund was synthesized in a classroom at UC-Berkeley, where founders Chida Khatua and Art Amador met during an entrepreneurship class.

Khatua's background in AI and machine learning complemented Amador's history in private wealth management, and the duo decided to launch an exchange-traded fund.

When Art Amador worked in private wealth management at Fidelity, his clients expected him to know absolutely everything.

Whether it related to global markets, macroeconomic factors, specific companies, or full sectors, their curiosities were wide ranging — and Amador wondered if he'd ever find a way to be the all-knowing oracle they desired.

That all changed one day in the fall of 2014 when Amador was pursuing his MBA at the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley. As part of an entrepreneurship class, he was placed in the same cohort as a long-time Intel engineer and machine-learning specialist named Chida Khatua, and the two got to talking. That conversation led to what its creators say is the world's first AI-powered exchange-traded fund, one built on technology that could change the paradigm for how computers are used to invest.

The fund — powered by IBM's Watson supercomputing technology — didn't end up launching for a few more years, but its roots can be traced back to that fateful first conversation at Berkeley.

"I was telling him it was impossible to have infinite knowledge about every stock, and about everything going on in markets," he tells Business Insider. "I told him that there's simply too much information out there and not enough time to distill it into actionable ideas."

As it turned out, Khatua had been researching for years how to sift through massive amounts of data in a way that extended far beyond human capabilities. With two master's degrees in computer engineering — including one from Stanford — he worked at Intel for 18 years, mostly focusing on machine learning.

"His background — in artificial intelligence and machine learning — was the perfect use case," Amador says. "We started talking about how that could apply to the equity markets."

Birth of an ETF

Even though the early groundwork had been laid for what would eventually become their newest venture, Khatua and Amador went their separate ways after the program ended. But the gears in Khatua's head never stopped turning, and in September 2016 he invited Amador to join him in building a product that would combine their respective areas of expertise.

Amador took some time to think about it. In his mind, the result would be an AI-powered quantitative hedge fund, and he wasn't sure if he wanted to give up his job at Fidelity for that. But Khatua had other ideas: He wanted to build and launch an ETF.

To him, the ideal application for his technology was to get it into as many hands as possible. And if he combined it with Amador's investment prowess, they could build an ETF available to be traded by the average person with a brokerage account.

Equbot

"Working at Intel gave me insight into how machine learnings and AI technology is maturing and how the benefits it offers can really be maximized," Khatua tells Business Insider. "It gave me a unique perspective, and I asked myself for a while when the right time would be to go out and create some product that can help many people."

Acting like a rational investor

A big part of Amador's decision to ultimately join Khatua in pursuing an ETF was the latter's acceptance into the highest tier of the IBM Global Entrepreneurship Program. After all, his machine learning and AI efforts were powered by the company's Watson supercomputer.

That gave Khatua $125,000 with which to pursue his idea, and it provided Amador crucial validation for the endeavor. He joined up shortly thereafter, and the duo launched Equbot.

Then they put Watson to work. The eventual result was the recently launched AI Powered Equity ETF (ticker: AIEQ), which analyzes more data than humanly possible, all in the pursuit of building the perfect portfolio of 30 to 70 stocks. And the technology enables it to do that while constantly analyzing information for 6,000 US-listed companies.

Equbot

But there's a wrinkle. Equbot's AI model is built to act like a rational investor. In addition to analyzing regulatory filings, quarterly news releases, articles, social-media postings, and management teams, it's also designed to assess market sentiment and weed out potentially faulty inputs — including so-called fake news.

"A rational investor looks at a company as a whole and they draw insight into what’s right looking at the complete picture," Khatua says. "The AI model helps us do that. The technology doesn’t only help you decide what to do; it can also educate you on why it’s happening."

The technology doesn’t only help you decide what to do; it can also educate you on why it’s happening.

That's a key element of AIEQ and one that sets it apart from the hedge funds that use AI to construct trading strategies. Khatua says many of those models function as a "conceptual black box," because the presence of certain stocks can't be explained in a rational way. In his mind, Equbot's ETF offers the best of both worlds: It's based on a mountain of analysis and the stock-picking methodology can be explained.

"We know why something's in our portfolio after our system chooses it," Amador says. "'The system picked it' is not usually an explanation that investors will buy."

Further, the machine-learning aspect of AIEQ is crucial in avoiding human error. Amador points out that even if a firm had 6,000 analysts each responsible for reading 150 to 200 articles about one stock each day, that work would have to be cross-referenced against the findings of all other employees, then funneled into one objective opinion.

"Humans don’t have the speed, capacity, or retention to do this," he says.

The story so far

AIEQ has slid 0.9% since its launch on October 18, while the benchmark S&P 500 has risen 1.6%. The biggest laggards in the fund are Lifepoint Health, Newell Brands and Vista Outdoor, which have each dropped more than 20% over the period.

But it's far too early to judge the success of AIEQ based on five weeks of returns. The more telling statistic is the volume of shares traded. The ETF has seen an average of 259,000 units change hands daily, a strong showing for a fledgling fund. It had about $70 million in assets on Monday, roughly 10 times its size during the first week of trading.

The way that Khatua and Amador see it, interest in their product will continue to grow as long as personal bias continues to cloud investment decisions — something they see happening even at the highest level of professional money management.

"You can remove that by making this investment process more autonomous, as we've done," Amador says. "It's nothing against people. It's just human instinct."

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